"Oh, good. It seems like she's waking up."

Violet's eyes slowly began to focus themselves as she lifted her head, which happened to be far from a pleasant sensation. She ached across most of her body, like someone had rubbed sandpaper back and forth over each of her muscles. At least the pain in her legs wasn't nearly as pronounced. Regardless, every inch of herself felt like it was gently throbbing. It seemed like she was in some sort of medical facility, or maybe it was a lab where she'd be subjected to inhumane experiments until she had outlived her usefulness. With her luck, she assumed the latter.

"It's good that you weren't out of it for too much longer. My name is Dr. Wess. Can you hear me?" The voice that called to her was soft and feminine, but it hummed with a throaty resonance that Violet was in no state to analyze right now. She just nodded weakly and looked at where the voice had come from.

Violet stopped focusing on the pain rather suddenly when she laid eyes on the woman who had been speaking. She was dressed in a set of pale pink medical scrubs overlaid by a white lab coat, and had a pair of rectangular-rimmed glasses resting on her face; the familiarity of the outfit was comforting, but simultaneously just confused Violet more when compared to everything else about the woman.

While her features and body looked human, her skin was pigmented a deep crimson. Two smooth horns jutted out from her forehead, curving up and back slightly along their length. Her ears swept back into sharp points, easily visible despite the head of voluminous black hair that framed the woman's face. For a moment, Violet assumed she was hallucinating, as one tends to when confronted by a doctor who looked like she'd come straight out of either an old religious text or one of a few rather specific video games that Violet had played in the past. The human girl's confusion was visible on her face, but the doctor apparently chalked it up to whatever was causing the pain across her body. Violet hadn't actually looked at what it was, herself, if it was even visible.

She groaned unsteadily, propping herself up with her arms at her sides as best she could as she sat up. Shit, that hurt a lot. The horned woman in front of her immediately came over to her bedside with a concerned tone to her voice.

"Hey, just relax. You're gonna be in here for a couple of hours while the nanites finish their work. It's important to make sure they get all the nerve pathways fully set up, otherwise you'll be dealing with rehab for a few months to get your motor control back." Dr. Wess gently pushed her back down against the bed with a hand. Violet hadn't really been trying to resist her, but the simple push from the (demonic doctor lady? She'd have to ask about that later) had seemed to decisively reposition her without effort.

Whatever the case, it didn't seem like Violet was here to be a lab rat, but... wait, nanites? Maybe she already had been experimented on while she was still unconscious?

Beyond a pang of fear that told her that she might be in danger, Violet found herself concerningly unbothered by that potentiality. She had clearly been in danger before she got here, so wherever she was now had to be an improvement, and that worked for her. She lay back down on the bed, her head propped up enough to be able to see the doctor.

"Are you able to speak, ma'am? What's your name?" Dr. Wess cocked her head and leaned over the bed inquisitively, which thankfully made it so Violet didn't have to strain nearly as much to look at her. Oh right, she had to actually speak to answer that. Violet cleared her throat, which while still sore wasn't the pulsating ache it had been when she first woke up. It still felt like starting a car that hadn't ran in a decade, her hoarse throat having to overcome years of disuse which culminated in a rather unflattering gurgling sound. Wait, it hadn't been used in decades, right? Unless this was some sort of weird cryosleep dream or something. The CCS Sarlace's flight path was expected to take about two hundred years or so; it was headed for a promising star system in Carina-Sagittarius arm, the next arm inwards from the Orion Spur. God knows the ship's P.A. had said it hundreds of times over prior to everyone entering cryosleep. A trip like that with modern engine tech was nothing revolutionary. So where-

"Ma'am?" The doctor's voice grabbed her with a lasso and yanked her off of her train of thought. Right, questions for later.

"V-violet. It's Violet."

"Alright, Violet. It's good that you can speak. I know you might have a lot going through your head right now, but please try to focus if you can." Violet nodded as best she could while keeping her head on the pillow. "You're in a hospital on Vrau'hael Spaceport. Can you recall where you last were, before this? Wherever you remember being most recently before you woke up." Dr. Wess spoke with a caring-but-serious intonation that anyone who had been in a hospital before was already well-accustomed to. Now that she'd gotten at least some sort of response, the demonic-looking doctor waited patiently as Violet swam back through the haze of her own memories.

"I was... being taken out of my cryosleep casket... I think. I could barely see or feel anything. It was just a blurry mess. Then I guess I passed out. I heard a lot of voices but I don't remember anything they were saying." She continued to focus on the doctor, blocking out the mild burning sensation that she felt traveling up her legs. Guess she spoke too soon about them hurting less.

Dr. Wess nodded as she picked up a clear, chamfered plexiglass tablet off the desk behind her using her tail. Using her... tail? Violet hadn't noticed that before. It was an inky black color and about an inch thick along most of the length, with a large spade-shaped tip like you might see on a playing card. The doctor herself hadn't moved at all, or rather, hadn't needed to. Her tail snaked around her side and passed the tablet into her hands, where it promptly booted up with an orange holographic display.

Violet just gawked. It wasn't often she was actually stunned like this. Had she woken up in some crazy gene-modder's paradise or something? Dr. Wess was too occupied with typing on her tablet to notice Violet's disbelief.

"I see." The doctor said as she pulled up a tall stool to sit on, her tail retreating behind her again without a second thought. "You're doing fine. Anything before you were in the pod?"

"Ye-ah...? Hm. Everything is a bit fuzzy before that." Violet responded, pushing her thoughts about the tail out of the way and alongside the myriad of other questions she'd wanted to ask since she awoke, her train of thought now more akin to a crowded railyard. "They told us memory decay was a potential side effect of cryosleep, though. I remember the weeks of leadup before the Sarlace was scheduled to depart. My other memories seem more and more vague as they go back, but the last few years I can mostly remember." She slightly tilted her head back and forth as she recalled various things that had happened.

"We had suspicions, but it wasn't until we confirmed that your genetic footprint was not found anywhere in Laevonian databases that we were certain." Dr. Wess spoke up again. "We had the derelict's name and identifier cross-referenced with Vo'to's archives, which have been maintained since they arrived on that planet roughly 400 years ago. Their records show that the CCS Sarlace was a colony ship launched from earth in the year 2125; you were listed on the passenger manifest. Does that match up with what you remember?" More things, names and places she needed to ask about later, but she filed them away for the time being.

"It does, yes. I turned twenty-four a few months before we departed, and I was born in 2101."

"I see. Then I apologize in advance for being the one to have to explain this to you." Dr. Wess sighed, her gaze downcast past her tablet. "Roughly one hundred and sixty years into its voyage, all contact between the Sarlace and Earth was lost. With no way for anyone to reach it by that point, the ship was... essentially written off. But apparently, the Sarlace was still partially operational this whole time. It was discovered traveling past the edge of Laevonian space three weeks ago, having far overshot the destination system listed in the manifest."

"So we... missed, essentially?" This was something that Violet had been, well, not worried of, but to an extent expecting. She already knew if she was in this bed, the voyage probably hadn't gone according to plan.

"Violet... you don't have to hear the rest of this, if you're not ready to. It's your choice." Dr. Wess said mercifully. But by this point, Violet knew she just needed to hear it. If she didn't know the full story, it would gnaw at her until she relented and found out what happened for herself. "I'm okay. Tell me what happened." She said resolutely. 

Dr. Wess kept on talking, her voice seeming a bit more grim and sullen, her long pointy ears drooping just a tiny bit. "In that case... potentially. We still aren't sure what exactly happened, nor are we certain we ever will be. Though much of the hull had been perforated by debris impacts, the reactors were still functional - if barely - when Laevon salvage crews reached the derelict. However, while the ship's powerplant was still running, most of the pod arrays had run out of cryogenic containment fluid or had simply been destroyed by debris."

"Oh."

"Yes." It was pretty clear to Violet what she was saying. The Sarlace had departed with almost six hundred thousand passengers aboard. A number like that... It made Violet feel a pit forming in her stomach. Especially the further implications that Dr. Wess was, as she spoke, turning into reality.

"Out of the entire ship, only fifteen pods had been recovered with signs of life, most of them from the bay you were housed in." Violet knew where this was going, and she didn't really have the emotions to properly process it. Or rather, she was feeling so many emotions that she wasn't sure which ones she should be feeling the most. It was simpler to push all of them away. So she did, and continued to listen. "All fifteen were in various stages of cryogenic decay, including yourself. All occupants were immediately transferred here to this hospital, but unfortunately... the degenerative effects, in most cases, had just been too severe. You were the only person who was able to be stabilized. I'm sorry, Violet. I don't know if you were traveling with any loved ones or not, but regardless... That kind of survivor guilt isn't something to take lightly."

Dr. Wess was wrong, not in what she said, but in her assumption of how Violet viewed the world. Taking things on the chin, shrugging them off, that was the only way she'd ever really gotten anywhere. Taking those feelings lightly was the only thing she could do, and so she did.

"I'll be okay. I just got lucky, I guess." She said with a blank expression. Dr. Wess looked at her with a twinge of pitiful suspicion, that sort of feeling when a friend says they're fine, but to contradict what they say they feel would feel like overstepping.

"Regardless of how it may seem, it could have been worse." Dr. Wess continued. Violet didn't think herself being dead alongside the rest of the crew would have been that much of a detriment. Not that she wanted herself to be dead, but having already filled in the pit in her stomach from earlier meant it was hard for her to feel any significance towards her survival. It wasn't some act of god, it had just been probability, and she was certain she wasn't the person who would make the most of those good odds. Either way, it didn't seem like the trip could have gone much worse than it had, unless the derelict managed to hit a passing asteroid and flatten an especially unfortunate group of little green spacemen. "How so?" Violet finally asked, masking her incredulity.

"Well, first off, the ship was adrift for centuries, and yet you probably wouldn't have survived if you had gotten here one hundred or even fifty earth years earlier. It's highly fortunate for you that the wreck was discovered when it was, but at the same time, even with modern medical procedures... there was also only so much that could be done to salvage your body."

"Salvage?" Violet said, tensing up as she ignored the implication of how long she had been floating out there.

Dr. Wess nodded. "That much time spent in cryostasis, like I explained before... some things had just been beyond the point of recovery."

Violet was suddenly and acutely aware of the fact she hadn't been able to look at herself since she first got into the cryosleep pod, and more important than that was that her body, especially her legs, felt much different from before. All of the questions that had built up since she awoke fell away into insignificance, with a new, all-important one pushing its way straight through her brain and out past her lips, its tone an indecisive mix of accusation and curiosity.

"What did you do to me?"